A groundbreaking interdisciplinary consortium led by Amin Doostmohammadi at the Niels Bohr International Academy has been awarded the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s most prestigious scientific challenge grant. This ambitious project, named ALIVE, aims to decipher the complex information flows that dictate how living tissues organize, maintain themselves, and respond to pathologies. The consortium includes eminent researchers, such as Xavier Trepat from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Nikta Fakhri from MIT, and Erwin Frey from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, bridging theoretical physics and experimental biology.
ALIVE’s core hypothesis is that living tissues are intrinsically information-processing systems, where mechanical forces, biochemical signals, and cellular identities act as conveyors of dynamic information. This information propagates with a distinct temporal direction — an arrow of time — that links local cellular activities to macroscopic tissue organization. Conceptually akin to a persistent current in a river, this arrow challenges conventional equilibrium-based frameworks by placing emphasis on non-equilibrium dynamics to explain how tissues self-organize without centralized control.
The project will focus on quantifying and mapping these information flows to predict tissue behavior under various physiological and pathological conditions. As Doostmohammadi elaborates, understanding the directionality and integrity of these informational currents may unlock novel predictive models for tissue function and failure, opening pathways for intervention strategies at the multicellular level.
To cover the evolutionary breadth of multicellular complexity, ALIVE will study four distinct systems: sea sponges representing the primordial origins of animal multicellularity, intestinal organoids as models of healthy tissue homeostasis, colorectal cancer organoids where tissue architecture is disrupted, and human embryoids derived from induced pluripotent stem cells that emulate early developmental processes. This spectrum enables a comprehensive approach to the principles steering tissue formation and dysfunction.
The consortium will employ cutting-edge techniques, including high-resolution force measurements, live-cell imaging, molecular perturbations, and theoretical models grounded in non-equilibrium statistical physics. At IBEC, Trepat’s team will leverage mechanobiology tools such as 3D tissue engineering and optogenetics to experimentally measure information transmission pathways in organoids and embryoids. These integrative approaches aim to generate large-scale datasets that marry mechanical and biochemical signals with emergent tissue patterns.
Such multidimensional datasets will fuel collaborations between theorists and experimentalists to develop a unified framework capturing the physics of information flow in living tissues. This synergy is expected to reveal fundamental principles governing development, regeneration, and cancer invasion, providing unprecedented mechanistic insights.
ALIVE is structured as a six-year program designed to foster discovery and train a new generation of researchers across the participating institutions. Its official launch, scheduled for April 2027 at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, marks the beginning of a pioneering journey into the physics of life’s one-way current — the irreversible arrow of time that sustains biological order from cellular chaos.
Keywords
Systems biology, biophysics, bioengineering, cell biology, developmental biology, organoids, stem cells, cancer research, tissue regeneration
